BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- Two pairs of photographs from "Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project" will be shown at the Whitney Biennial, one of the nation's premier annual exhibitions, beginning in March.

Recently acquired for the Birmingham Museum of Art's collection by three museum support groups, the photographs will be on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The dual images -- of Maxine Adams and Amelia Maxwell, and Braxton McKinney and Lavone Thomas -- were among six diptychs acquired by the Collectors Circle for Contemporary Art, the Photography Guild and the Sankofa Society. The entire project of 16 diptychs and two side-by-side videos titled "9.15.63," which BMA commissioned, will be on display at the museum through Dec. 2.

Bey's project, 6½ years in the planning stages, involved photographing African-American girls and boys age 11-14, and women and men 50 years older, during a five-month period in 2012 and 2013. It commemorated the 50th anniversary of four girls killed at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing and two boys killed in separate incidents on Sept. 15, 1963.

Braxton McKinney and Lavone Thomas, diptych in "The Birmingham Project."

“You cannot literally reconstruct the past, but by making photographs of young people in Birmingham who were the same ages of the six African-Americans killed that day, and to suggest both the passage of time and the lives those young people never got to live, it's a way of layering the past and the present," Bey told AL.com in December 2012.Bey, who was 10 at the time of the killings, first learned of the bombing from Lorraine Hansberry's “The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality," a book that was brought home by his parents. It showed an image of bombing victim Addie May Collins' sister, Sarah, lying in a hospital bed with her eyes bandaged.

The Whitney Museum of American Art.

“It's easy to forget how small and vulnerable a 11-year-old or 14-year-old child is,” said Bey, a Harlem native who teaches at Columbia College in Chicago. “It was a valuable and emotional experience each time a young person walked in. My heart would catch. The older adults were that age in 1963.”The Whitney Biennial, which showcases more than 100 artists, will take place March 7 through May 25, 2014.